>You want your soldiers (AKA initiates) to have enough discipline to
>obey orders, but you do *not* want them attempting heroics!
>Stormbulls should not feel compelled to fight a Chaos menace alone
>when they are obviously outclassed. [So humakti can be smart, too]
Ah, but you have subtly distorted the argument, albeit unwittingly. The question is not, "Should we throw away our lives on these undead." but rather, "should I abandon my comrades?" The situation as described was such that the Humakti, for whatever reason, could not escape the undead. I have no objection to Humakti running away from undead, or refusing to fight them, or _any_ of that sort of stuff, if they think they're too weak. My objection is that, given that the Humakti's friends _cannot_ get away, he should not abandon them.
To use a real-world example that I think is appropriate, when the Mexican Army was closing in on the Alamo, Colonel Travis gave all the defenders the option to leave, if they didn't want to stay and die with the rest. My theory is that a proper Humakti would have agreed to stay and die -- and _not_ have fled after the battle started. If Travis had chosen to march away from the Alamo before the Mexicans arrived, a good Humakti would have cheerfully marched away with him.
NOTE: I submit that if the Humakti in question had stayed to fight the undead, and he had been the last party member left alive, all the rest killed by the undead, that if he _then_ teleported out of danger, he would not necessarily be tagged as a Bad Person. "He stayed until it was useless to stay any longer." Or if his Sword had said, "Joe! You can teleport out of here. Flee. Don't stay here to die uselessly!" And he'd then teleported, he would be better off than he was. On the other hand, a _really_ good Humakti would probably have stayed regardless of his Sword's orders in such a case.
All this is not to say that Humakti don't feel the pangs of cowardice and try to rationalize their actions just like everyone else. It's just that they're supposed to be heroes.
Doug the lurker
> I always thought the whole reason broos looked like goats was
>*because* the Orlanthi herded goats
Wow, good point. There _must_ be goats around, or the broos wouldn't be called goatkin any more. They'd be dogkin or pigkin or whatever the next-most-accessible animal around was.
David Gadbois makes a powerful argument
>but it seems like there is a lot of MGF in having domestic
>triceratops lumbering around. Oxen? Who needs them when one of the
>big guys can plow an acre in a minute?
Suddenly the presence of domestic triceratops becomes a certainty within the Lunar Heartland. Obviously your typical landholder can't afford to own his _own_ triceratops. Hence we have the job of Triceratops-owner, in which the fellow owns his own triceratops and rents it out to those in need.
End of Glorantha Digest V1 #172
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